Before the Earth was round
This music video was a personal project created as an ode to my favourite band, OK Go! I chose their song ‘Before the Earth was round’ from the album Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky because I knew I wanted to create a LEGO stop-motion animation, and to begin with a brickified Earth seemed like a perfect coincidence that fit with the song title.
Everything was made in Blender and most LEGO models were sourced from mecabricks.com. My main aim for this project was to get the LEGO to look as photo real as possible by working a lot on surface imperfections, texturing, and realistic animation and mechanics for the Rube Goldberg machine.
There were a few important concepts I wanted to adhere to for this project including making it a ‘one-take video’ (an OK Go music video trope).
Environment
Good reflections and lighting were crucial to help with photo realism. So what better to use than actual photos! The above photographs were taken in my garage and were used to drive the base colour and roughness of the geometry.
I replicated the real life lighting to help the image textures blend in better and give the LEGO sets some basic lighting. This was aided by extra lights off-camera and some subtle ones in front where needed.
Mosaic effect
The animated screen effect was a very fun effect to work out how to do. The video itself is a separate file I created in After Effects using 3 elements; a waveform driven directly by the song which would be synchronized in the final video, a glowing line art version of OK Go’s WTF music video, and some white text.
In order to apply the animation to thousands of individual pieces of geometry I projected the UVs to fit within the video frame and then scaled down the UVs for each stud so they’d sample from a single pixel (to ensure each stud only had one solid colour at a time).
As previous music videos from OK Go inspired me to create this one I felt it was only fitting to add numerous Easter Eggs to some of their videos, including (but definitely not limited to) their zero gravity, rube goldberg, and using thousands of umbrellas to create animated pixel art videos!